The Director of the Climate Change Directorate of the Forestry Commission, Ms. Rosely Fosuah Adjei, has made a passionate appeal to the donor community to support local communities in documenting their lands.
She furthered that in Ghana, there are two categories of farm lands, that is the on-reserve areas where the lands have been gazetted and are managed by the Government, and the off-reserve ungazetted areas, which belong to families or stools. But the challenges associated with land use are mainly found in the off -reserve areas with forest and farm lands. These lands have been passed on from generation to generation and there are no documents covering so it is difficult to know who the owners are. “These are lands that have been passed on through different generations, most of them do not have any paper work on them and so being able to secure them for particular people sometimes becomes a challenge”, she said.
Ms. Adjei continued that the patriarchal system of inheritance in some local communities in Ghana also puts women at a disadvantage as it becomes difficult for them to own lands. But then every farmer or local community member has access to lands for farms but owning it is where the issue is. “We need to decipher these two things, ownership is one thing and access to use the land is another thing. However, owning that land means you need to get into documentation. So I think one of the big solutions we need is to support local communities to document their land rights because if we do not have proper documentation, even in our ER programs, it becomes difficult to identify who to give what to. That is why in Ghana , we build our ER programs around who manages the land and not who owns the land, “she said.
She also mentioned that another challenge to land use in Ghana is the issue of “caretakers” of lands. These people are not farmers but they take care of the farms for their owners. So when they stay on the land for many years, some of them begin to get entitled to it or even encroach on forest areas so they can also have lands of their own.
She suggested that the only way that this issue could be addressed is through documentation as that will help to secure tenural rights for the off- reserve areas where lands have been passed on from generation to generation without any form of documentation.
The Director of the Climate Change Department reiterated that with the introduction of digitalisation, it will be easy to pick the GPS locations of the lands and plot them to start the processes of documenting the lands.
She made this appeal at an event dubbed “Call to Action on Securing Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities Forest Tenure”, organised by the Forest and Climate Leaders Partnership (FCLP) at the Twenty-Ninth Conference of the Parties (COP 29) of the United Nations Climate Change Conference, held at Baku, Azerbaijan.
The event had two discussion panels; in the first one, panelists from various organisations in Brazil, Norway, United Kingdom, Germany, USA discussed “Advancing Financing for Forest Tenure for Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities.
The second panel had representatives from like-minded organisations in Peru, Columbia and Ghana, represented by Ms. Roselyn Fosuah Adjei, Director of the Climate Change Department.
In attendance at this meeting were two local communities representatives, Mr. Sylvester Mensah, Chairman of the Sefwi-Wiawso Bibiani HIA, and Madam Nallice Adjei, Treasurer of the Juaboso-Bia HIA. They were sponsored by Forestry Commission and UNDP to attend the COP 29.
The FCLP is a government-led partnership that works across a range of policy areas to identify how international collaboration can drive high-impact policy outcomes on a global scale. One of the policy areas is focused on supporting indigenous Peoples and Local Communities, led by Peru and Norway.
